Perhaps that is what you desire to save an image or a video clip from the web through your browser because it’ll make a great wallpaper or you want to include it in a video you’re making. In most cases (especially when it comes to pictures) you can simply right-click on the file and choose “save image as,” or something similar.

But sometimes that doesn’t work, or not well enough. What if there’s no save option on the right-click menu? How can you quickly save many images from one website? What if you’re trying to save an animated video as a GIF, or you keep downloading one of those .webp files no one wants?

That’s where third-party browser extensions can come in handy, add-ons that will dig deeper into a page’s HTML code to pluck out the image or the video clip you’re after and automate the process for you.

Image Downloader Continued

Open Image Downloader Continued (Chrome/Edge) and you’ll get a neatly organized grid of all the images on the current web page: You can see the format and the dimensions of each picture, save them to a disk, and even filter and order them based on their size. The add-on couldn’t be any simpler to use, and it’s one of the best for downloading images.

Take a look at all images

Download All Images Chrome/Edge works slightly differently than Image Downloader Continued. It might be able to grab some images when Image Downloader Continued can’t, and vice versa. Click on the extension button when you’re on a site, and every image on the page will be wrapped into a zip archive so you just have to choose where to save it.

Save All Images offers you several saving options.

David Nield: All Images 

Video Downloader Ultimate

If you’re struggling to save a video from a website—whether it’s embedded in the page or included in a social media post—Video Downloader Ultimate (Chrome/Edge) can lend a hand. With a single click, you’ll see a list of all the videos included in the website that you’re currently viewing, and you can then either get their URLs or save them locally.

Twitter Video Downloader

Twitter Video Downloader Chrome/Edge is a tool that can be used to download videos from Twitter. It embeds the clips in the webpage and grabs them quickly. Simply click the “Download” icon near a tweet that contains a video to save it.

Base Image Downloader can filter images by their size.

Base Image Downloader via David Nield

Base Image Downloader

Extracting GIFs is not an easy task. GIFs can be published on different sites. Others use the mp4 file format. Some convert them back. No matter what format you use, Base Image Downloader Chrome/Edge excels in grabbing almost any GIF-related image and supports all other formats. This extension opens a gallery with thumbnails of images. You can either save all or one image at a given time.

Screen Recorder and Editor

If other tools don’t work, you can try using a screen recording tool instead. The Screen Recorder and Editor (Chrome/Edge), one of my favorite screen recording tools, offers a variety of ways to record the tabs or entire desktop. It also includes the ability to edit.

You can save page WE to choose what parts of a site you want to download.

David Nield Saves Page WE 

Get a Discount on Page WE

A second option is to grab all elements on a webpage. This can be done using Save Page WE (Chrome/Edge). It’s simple to use and supports keyboard shortcuts. Depending on the site you’re working with, you can opt to save images from a page to a disk, and in some cases this works for audio and video files as well.

Take a look at all images

While Download All Images (Firefox) has the same name as another extension above, it’s not the same utility—and this one works with Mozilla’s browser. This add-on offers a host of options, enabling you to filter downloads by image size, image type, and even image URL (so you don’t accidentally download ads or other linked content), and there’s plenty of flexibility when it comes to how the grabbed pictures are saved.

You have many options with Download All Images

Screenshot: All Images Downloadable via David Nield 

DownThemAll

DownThemAll, also known as Firefox, is able to grab everything on a site, even images and video clips. It’s by no means a blunt instrument and comes with plenty of options for choosing what to save and where to save it. It is one of the extensions that you’ll quickly discover indispensable.

SingleFile

SingleFile (Firefox), an extension which saves web pages in full, is another great tool. It’ll download all of the HTML, text, and images on a particular website, and it integrates very neatly into the Firefox interface. If you’re struggling to grab images with other extensions, this one might be the solution.

James Clear author of Atomic Habits, adds that looking at data can be a good starting point. “For fitness habits, it could be things like your Apple Watch or Whoop band or MyFitnessPal. There are many different ways to get data,” he says. “It also can be true for habits that maybe you wouldn’t think about tracking.” For example, looking at your calendar for the past year to determine whether you spent enough time at home with your family, or whether you were traveling for work too much. “If you’re so busy that you never give yourself time to think about what you’re doing … it’s really hard to improve, because you’re just busy repeating the same thing again and again. You don’t have a chance to look at the bigger picture.”

Picking your Habit and Digging deeper to Create a Plan

Once you’ve done your review of the habits you’d like to break, you should pick one of them to start with.

“I look at a number of the challenges a patient is facing and then ask myself, ‘Which one is in the driver’s seat?’” says Mendelsohn. “Meaning if I tackle one of these problems, are the rest of them likely to get better?”

The next step is to decide how you’re going to go about breaking the habit you’ve chosen, based on your history with it and the context or cues that lead to you performing the behavior. These are just a few of the examples.

Don’t Spend Too Much

Imagine that you are spending too much and you want to change this habit. You’ve determined that you started overspending when you added your credit cards to your Apple Wallet or PayPal. It was then very easy to purchase things when you see an advertisement on Facebook or receive a link from a friend. “You want spending money to be as difficult and thoughtful as possible,” Wood says. “Putting all your credit cards on your phone that you carry everywhere is counterproductive—you are further automating the process of spending money.” To fix this, you decide to remove your cards from all online payment services so each time you want to buy something, you have to physically go and pull out the card, which then gives you a bit more time to think about the purchase itself. It is also possible to ask your friends not send products or unsubscribe from product marketing emails.

You can check your phone all the time

If you’re trying to check your phone less often, David Kadavy, author of Mind Management and Not Time ManagementHe suggests that you lock it up in a locked box for a portion of your day. “Make it as hard as possible to actually perform the habit,” he says. While you’re still going to get the cue to check your phone, the effort of going to the lockbox and unlocking it can help block the behavior from triggering. Or, say you’re trying to check social media less often: “Just delete the social media apps from your phone,” says Kadavy. “Block them with the parental controls or, at the very least, don’t have them on your home screen.”

Not eating healthy

Clear’s own negative eating habits are a perfect example. In the house he used to live in, there was a McDonald’s right after the highway exit on his way home. He would stop there at least once a week. “I looked at myself after the last one, and I was like, ‘Am I going to do this every time I drive home? Am I just going to stop here and eat here every single time?’” he says. “Ultimately, what I decided to do was to start taking a different path home. If I went left off of the exit instead of right, it would take an extra three minutes, but I wouldn’t pass the McDonald’s. I changed the environment so that I wouldn’t be exposed to the cue. That added enough friction and enough separation that the habit would change.”

Do not procrastinate

“A lot of people tend to procrastinate, then rely on anxiety and fear to motivate them to get tasks done,” says Mendelsohn. “This can be effective at getting things done, but at the cost of causing unnecessary stress. Breaking tasks down into smaller ones can be a harder strategy to implement at first, but more sustainable in the long run.” To help you get started, Mendelsohn suggests writing these tasks down using a pen and paper, as it can be “really helpful for people to keep their organizational strategies separate from the digital tools we use all day.”

Sometimes, substituting a negative behavior for a more desirable one can work at blocking it—but, Wood says you have to know what the cue is, and the alternative behavior has to be both easy and rewarding. Say you’ve decided to drink a glass of water whenever you have the urge to look at your phone, instead of locking it away somewhere or putting it facedown next to you. “For most people, drinking a glass of water isn’t going to be as interesting as looking at their phones, so I don’t know if that’s going to work particularly well,” says Wood.

If your chosen way to try and break your habit isn’t working, maybe it’s time to try something else. Another thing to keep in mind is that “for some specific behaviors, like quitting smoking, multiple attempts is actually a good thing,” Wood says. “Because most people who ultimately quit have to keep trying until they figure out the right thing that will work for them.”

So don’t get discouraged if it’s taking a while to break your habit. Sometimes, you need to change your approach or look deeper at the context and cues that allowed you to perform the task.